Happened to a father from my kid's little league team, during a game he should have showed up for instead. Hush hush in the local paper, etc., but everybody heard. You have to feel for the mom to stay in the same town after that.

Meanwhile, "Burn Notice" is back. I've written a note to Bruce Campbell urging him to avoid death by sexual misadventure for the next twenty-to-thirty years. I'm holding out hope for the Return of Briscoe County Jr.

Jane, you are now the frontrunner for my blogger observation of the year award with that comment about the sartorial preferences of those making a voluntary checkout from this level of creation (not that I indulge myself the fantasy that anyone gives a hoot about my blogger observation of the year award).

One of the waittresses at Murrell's comes from Cape Cod, and her best friend is from Boston. She came up to me and asked me what I was doing down in Shreveport with Massachusetts license plates and my car filled with stuff, and I had a nice chat with her while I had my breakfast (by the way, gravy goes great not only on biscuits, but also on hash browns and omelettes).

OK, thanks, verner. One of his elementary, middle and high school friends is doing Teach For America in Baton Rouge. The training is in Phoenix, Arizona, but the friend is going to be teaching in one of the Baton Rouge schools.

Meanwhile, let's hope the JOM Red Wings and Penguins fans are enjoying a great Stanley Cup Finals series, now tied at 2-2.

Years ago, a family in my area lost a pubescent boy in this fashion. My parents had never heard of this particular form of auto-eroticism. when I told them about it, they had a look on their face (they were from the Greatest Generation) like they had now heard too much. And the poor family, how their grief must have been worsened by the awfulness of the method of dying. They didn't say anything to anyone, even sort of acted as if the kid hadn't even died. Awful. Awful. Awful. I remember in law school reading a police detective manual (while I should have been studying torts and contracts) that said this form of death is quite common, esp. among young adolescent boys. Really horrible.

I wouldn't call it common. There have certainly been times when parents have covered up the autoerotic asphyxia aspects of their kid's death, to save the humiliation, and made it look like a suicide instead of an accident. Then the kid's friends all wonder why he killed himself when he never seemed at all suicidal.

Unless he assumed that there was zero risk involved, it seems an absolutely insane thing for a 72-year-old married father of three to do. It's tragic enough when an adolescent boy dies this way, but surely Carradine should have been able to calculate the horrible stain he would leave for his wife and children to deal with for the rest of their lives, let alone his own legacy.

I hope I don't sound painfully naive and provincial, but I have a difficult time discerning the thrill for these guys of tying a rope around their nards and one around their neck hard enough to choke them to death.

This is somehow more fun than a roll in the hay with their wife or girlfriend, or even someone else's?

It sounds like about as much fun as a roll in the hay with a bushel of poison ivy and a handful of furniture tacks.

I was debating whether to confess my ignorance as to how one gets from autoeroticism (or eroticism of any sort) to asphyxia. This is not a request for information, incidentally, of which there has been quite enough, thank you.